Environmental Test Lab Services

Our environmental test lab service is a UKAS accredited test house (Test House Number 0461) offering environmental and EMC testing to a very wide range of national and international standards whilst satisfying the UKAS accreditation regulations.

Test advice and consultancy

Our team of environmental engineers represent over 40 years’ experience developing a test laboratory capable of testing technologically advanced equipment in some of the most comprehensive dynamic and climatic test environments.

This experience enables us to provide expert advice to customers unfamiliar with environmental testing in areas such as:

Preparation of test plans and procedures

Interpretation of national and international standards

Determining the initial test concept through to delivering a complete qualification test programme

Our experts are able manage standard or bespoke test programmes for a wide range of products including:

Design Proving

Qualification

Reliability Growth Programmes (RGP)

Reliability Demonstration testing (RDT)

Environmental Stress Screening (ESS)

Industry case studies

To understand how our environmental test laboratory could benefit your business, read more about the type of services we have already delivered across a variety of industry sectors.

Commercial packaging

Products are normally thought of by their content or the function that they perform. The packaging used significantly contributes to the branding, protection, performance and resilience of the product so testing is a key feature of market success. we have worked closely with the food and drinks industry sector over a long period. For high quality gift products such as Scotch Malt Whisky, it is critical that the product reaches the customer in perfect condition. Our understanding of the land based and airfreight shipping environments has enabled the company to develop a range of tests tailored to ensuring product integrity as delivered to the customer. Customers undertaking these tests benefit from independent certification of their packaging technologies in a range of environments. Successful testing in these conditions can ensure that any weaknesses in the packaging design can be rectified before the product launch.

Medical Instrumentations

Our Environmental Test Lab was approached by a leading medical technology company to test new imaging technology ahead of its international launch. The company was able to apply its extensive expertise in testing a range of laser and optical devices for its military products to ensure the integrity of the new technology. Where available, we comply in full with the requirements of the appropriate standard and with any other criteria prescribed by the body granting approval. The environmental conditions that the medical equipment would experience during transportation, storage and operations throughout the World were reviewed which led to a comprehensive test programme being developed to simulate these conditions and thereby test the continued quality of the product.

Space technology

In the Space environment, detailed and exhaustive dynamic and climatic testing under vacuum conditions and over a wide temperature range is necessary to simulate the extremes that Space bound technology needs to survive. Successful testing in these conditions identifies any weaknesses in the design thereby allowing any technology to be rectified before launch. This enables the product to be qualified such that failures during launch, entering operations and through the operational life are eliminated where possible. In this environment there are no second chances. We have over 40 years of experience in the Space sector. In the Environmental Testing sector, the company has had particular success in the testing of mechanical and micro-electromechanical (MEMS) gyro technologies and their supporting electronic systems. We have worked with the European Space Agency and satellite primes to develop new and standards for some elements of the testing design to suit the new technology and demands of the mission. Extensive testing was completed including EMC, ESD, thermal vacuum, vibration and shock testing to high levels were designed and completed. In addition to in-house product qualification, we have completed environmental testing campaigns on technologies for Space including power supplies, solar array and miniaturised systems for a number of applications.

Wind and Renewable energy

The UK is at the forefront of developing technologies and systems necessary to capture wind and other renewable energy. Research and development of hydraulically efficient power generation from wind turbines required an engineering design company to approach us for advice on Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) - testing of their novel control systems for a hydraulic machine.

Through a number of visits between sites and considerable discussion to understand the requirements, we were able to provide a test regime designed to expose the equipment to vibration equivalent to that seen in service. The vibration tests applied were essentially Sine on Random tests through a step stress approach which were tuned using data measured on a live test rig. It was a steep collaborative learning curve for the client specialists who had no experience in vibration testing and for our environmental engineering team who had no experience in the wind turbine field. The work was completed under tight financial constraints and achieved the desired results. A number of product design improvements were identified enabling the full potential of the product design to be realised.